Culture Vulture

Culture Vulture: Back to Laramie: Moises Kaufman’s Epilogue and Judy Shepard’s Memoir

October 15, 2009
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By Helen Epstein I saw “The Laramie Project Epilogue” at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, one of a reported 150 venues around the world where staged readings took place this week, the eleventh anniversary of what has become perhaps the most famous hate crime in the world. In October of 1998, twenty-one year…

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Culture Vulture: BSO’ s Death-drenched Russian program

October 13, 2009
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By Helen Epstein Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich Symphony Hall Boston, MA Vasily Petrenko, conductor Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to…

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Coming Attractions: Culture Vulture’s October Picks

September 30, 2009
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by Helen Epstein I’m looking forward to what looks to be the best fall foliage season in years in the Berkshires. American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA through October 12. A very popular summer exhibit has been held over. It covers Rockwell’s entire 65-year career, interpreted and…

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Culture Vulture: Orhan Pamuk At Harvard

September 22, 2009
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By Helen Epstein A friend of mine who used to teach at Harvard says, “the place is filled with pompous people who think they have to be the smartest and most sophisticated in the world — at least in their field,” so it was a delight this afternoon to hear the unpretentious and visibly agitated…

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Culture Vulture: Coming Attractions — Gloucester City Hall Murals

September 18, 2009
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By Helen Epstein Of the 100 or so events scheduled for Essex County’s Eighth Annual Trails and Sails Festival the last weekend of September, culture vultures should not miss Gloucester’s Committee for the Arts tours of Gloucester City Hall’s wall murals, created by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s. Culture Vulture talked about them…

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Arts Feature: Two Grand Berkshire Cottages

September 2, 2009
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By Helen Epstein When you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the Mass Pike or the Taconic Parkway it’s instructive to reflect that one hundred and fifty years ago, it often took less time to get to the Berkshires from Boston or New York City than it does today. The Berkshires were then a major…

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Culture Vulture: Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Lecture

August 27, 2009
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By Helen Epstein No one reviews talks but I’ve just attended two by some highly gifted women that deserve wider notice. Director Anna Brownsted and actress Dana Harrison discussed their work on R.T. Rogers’ provocative play “White People” at Shakespeare & Company last week and author Brenda Wineapple gave a brilliant mini-seminar in American cultural…

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Theater Review: “White People” at Shakespeare and Company

August 24, 2009
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White People by J.T. Rogers. Directed by Anna Brownsted. At Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, Massachusetts, through September 4. By Helen Epstein What can possibly connect a reflective young History professor in New York’s Stuyvesant Town, a disconsolate Southern housewife and ex-homecoming queen, and a demanding Midwestern corporate lawyer? In J.T. Rogers’ powerful drama White People…

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Culture Vulture: A Unique Blend of Jewish Memoir and Musicology

August 23, 2009
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THE THOMASHEVSKYS: MUSIC AND MEMORIES OF A LIFE IN THE YIDDISH THEATER. Written and hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas. Directed by Patricia Birch, with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. by Helen Epstein I’m a fan of the serious introspective kind of memoir, that tries to wrest meaning from existential and emotional chaos.…

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Culture Vulture: Andre Previn and the Art of Literate Conversation

August 16, 2009
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by Helen Epstein Go here for information about a live-chat, scheduled for August 23rd, with Helen Epstein on “The Art of Narrative Writing.” They were around for most of my lifetime, I thought as I listened to Martin Bookspan, the 83-year-old radio announcer and music commentator and 80-year-old conductor, composer, and jazz artist Andre Previn.

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